Moonbeam Science – And Then There’s Dr. Ben Carson’s Real Science

“JerryBrownByPhilKonstantin” by Phil Konstantin – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.California Gov. Jerry Brown calls Dr. Ben Carson a science denier for not buying into his global warming agenda. Would that be the same Dr. Carson with a degree in neurosurgery and a science school named after him?

Horning in uninvited on Carson’s presidential campaign, Brown sent Carson a letter questioning the latter’s skeptical stance on global warming. The letter, complete with a thumb drive of a United Nations report, questioned Carson’s motives and condescendingly concluded:

“Please use your considerable intelligence to review this material. Climate change is much bigger than partisan politics.”

Then Brown called Carson a “climate-science denier” in a retweeted tweet from his press office.

Never mind that Carson calls himself a “climate science questioner.” Brown is such a green zealot he calls anyone who asks questions an anti-science yahoo.

That’s something else, given Carson’s stunning record of achievement in actual science. We aren’t talking about the dreamy theories of global warming that amount to Brown’s faith, but in actual mastery.

Carson, according to his Wikipedia page, was a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery and pediatrics, and the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the most prestigious medical establishments in the world. He has done life-saving, ground-breaking surgery and won top professional awards in his field.

Science? The record also shows that he graduated from the University of Michigan’s medical school, one of the nation’s top five according to U.S. News and World Report. To get his degree, he had to acquire an expertise in subjects so difficult that only a few are conversant in them.

To dismiss someone with this kind of record as somehow anti-science is the height of frivolity and malice.

Such criticism is rich coming from Brown, given his own record of hostility to science. Science writer John Horgan, in a 2014 Scientific America essay called “My Weird ’96 Chat With Jerry Brown About The Evils Of Science,” wrote of how Brown hectored him on how science was the root of all the world’s evils.

“I found myself in the odd position of having to defend scientists,” Horgan wrote.

And this governor thinks he has a right to lecture Carson about science? Like so much else about Brown, it’s fantasyland stuff.